UNIVERSITY OF MICHIGAN JOINS THE COMPACT FOR OPEN ACCESS PUBLISHING EQUITY

ANN ARBOR. The University of Michigan announces its participation in the Compact for Open-Access Publishing Equity (COPE). COPE is a consortium of universities that support open-access publishing by subsidizing publication fees for open-access journals. Many leading universities and research centers are members of the compact, including Cornell University, Dartmouth College, Harvard University, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, University of California at Berkeley, University of Ottawa, Columbia University, and the Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center. At the University of Michigan, the program will be administered and funded by the University Library.

Noah Gardiner, a third-year graduate student in the [Near Eastern Studies] Department’s AAPTIS division, is a member of the team that is re-cataloguing and digitizing our Library’s splendid collection of Islamic manuscripts. (This three-year project, “Collaboration in Cataloging: Islamic Manuscripts at Michigan,” is funded with a grant from the Mellon Foundation, see http://www.lib.umich.edu/collaboration-cataloging-islamic-manuscripts-michigan and http://www.lib.umich.edu/islamic/ .)

Pamela Samuelson, Professor at Berkeley Law School and School of Information, came to the University of Michigan to discuss the Google Book Settlement and its implications for copyright reform. Professor Samuelson said that her talk “explains why certain dysfunctional aspects of U.S. copyright law contributed both to the Google Book Search project and to the settlement of the Authors Guild lawsuit, and why the proposed settlement would achieve some copyright reform, although at a cost that may not be worth paying.” See http://people.ischool.berkeley.edu/~pam/.